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OT: The vaccine brigade would do well to remember the field has problems…

Don’t expect that cure for cancer soon, the charities should be sued for false advertising.

This is mostly a pharma finding.

Something is rotten in the state of biomedical research. Everyone who works in the field knows this on some level. We applaud presentations by colleagues at conferences, hoping that they will extend the same courtesy to us, but we know in our hearts that the majority or even the vast majority of our research claims are false.

…As of April, no fewer than 25 cancer drugs that prolong life will be withdrawn by the fund.

Imagine how these cancer patients and their families must have felt this week when, following a major trial on a £12-a-day drug which helps prevent people catching HIV, they learned researchers were recommending that healthy gay men should be given it free on the NHS at a cost of almost £5,000 a year per person.

All so that the lucky recipients can have unprotected sex with less chance of catching HIV…

What kind of ethics is it to save one group of society from a disease that can be prevented by using a £1 condom, while denying cancer sufferers a longer life?….

People are not one group anymore, they’re interest groups. The cancer group don’t have the hate speech laws on their side and numerous legal counsel to protect the ‘rights’ which aren’t rights.

Researchers used health data from Denmark to compare 317 women diagnosed with glioma, a type of brain tumour, and 2,126 who were free of the disease.

Women who had ever used an oral contraceptive or hormone-releasing intra-uterine device (IUD), or coil, were 50 per cent more likely to develop brain cancer than those who had not.

The difference in risk increased to 90 per cent, just under double, for women who had used one of the contraceptives for five years or more.

Progestagen-only contraceptives were most strongly associated with glioma, raising the risk almost three-fold.

In terms of cancer type, the risk was greatest for gliobastoma multiforme, the most aggressive type of primary brain tumour.

‘While we found a statistically significant association between hormonal contraceptive use and glioma risk, a risk-benefit evaluation would still favour the use of hormonal contraceptives in eligible users.’

Pump artificial hormones into your body! It’s good for it!
Take drugs you don’t need, it’s good for women!

The findings are reported in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

The hormone progesterone is known to increase proliferation of high-grade glioma cells called astrocytomas in the laboratory.

It is also thought to raise levels of growth factors, natural substances that stimulate cell growth.

But the scientists said it was impossible to form any conclusions about how progesterone-containing contraceptives might influence brain cancer development.

Experts commenting on the results emphasised the importance of keeping them in perspective.

Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University, said: ‘Glioma is fortunately very rare.

‘Even if oral contraceptives did increase the risk to the extent suggested by this study, it would only mean one extra glioma each year for every 50,000 women taking the pill.

‘Suppose, however, all these women changed to a less effective form of contraception and 10,000 of them got pregnant: we would then expect one extra mother and 40 extra babies to die.’

Statistician Professor Kevin McConway, from The Open University, said: ‘Previous scares about possible increased health risks from contraceptive pills have had bad consequences for public health.

‘On hearing that taking the Pill might lead to an increased risk of certain diseases, some women switched away from the Pill to less reliable forms of contraception, or none at all.

‘That increased numbers of abortions, and exposed the women to health risks from pregnancy and abortion that were generally far greater than any reduction in risk from the diseases in the scare.

‘Brain tumours are not at all common.

‘So even if long-term pill use does double the risk, well, twice a very small risk is still a very small risk.’

The fact they make gobloads more money from these methods has NOTHING to do with it.
Bear in mind, this is ONE condition. They’ve only begun testing for this sort of thing.